Updike and Emerson, Pt. 1

I love John Updike. My 95-page chapter on the first two Rabbit Angstrom books was my favorite part of my master's thesis, even though it got cut because it was an "indefensible argument." (I can tell that story another time, if anyone is interested.) And I love his criticism; Updike seems like he reads for 18-20 hours per day, and his comments and evaluations are usually sharp and interesting.

So you can imagine my horror today when a visiting philosopher, Dr. Russell Goodman (who's a very nice, very approachable, and brilliant man), took a potshot at him during a lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Pragmatism. He talked about common misconceptions and oversimplifications of Emerson's message; he's often treated as though his sole message were "follow your bliss d00d," a viewpoint which ignores almost every essay other than "Self-Reliance."

"The New Yorker, for example," he said in a voice dripping with irony, "had John Updike"--he pronounced that name with the sneer that I'm used to hearing from academics--"write a condescending piece on Emerson. And then, 25 years later, they couldn't find anyone new, so they had Updike write another one." Goodman suggested that Updike subscribes to the popular view on Emerson's thought and condemns him for his own misreading. I was upset at first, but I rethought my opinion; I'd read the second piece, from 2003, but at that point I hadn't read all that much Emerson and my own opinion followed those oversimplifications pretty closely. Maybe Updike dropped the ball on this one. I mean, the man's not perfect.

I own two books of Updike's criticism--Picked-Up Pieces and Hugging the Shore--but that's not even half of his critical output, and I couldn't find his original (1970s?) essay on Emerson in them. But he makes offhand references to the Sage of Concord from time to time, always in either neutral or positive terms. Here's an example, from an essay called "Whitman's Egotheism":

Like many of his radiant literary generation, he borrowed courage from Emerson; but Whitman's brave advice bears no accent of the lectern, and small flavor of the stoic.

Updike may privilege Whitman here, as he privileges Melville elsewhere, but this is hardly a condemnation of Emerson; he gives the latter credit for the former's existence. Elsewhere, he claims that Emerson began a new tradition in American prose style, "cranky, granular, impulsive, confessional." This description is a positive for Updike--he uses it to contrast John Cheever's "taut and mordant" older style with his newer, more satisfactory one.

In an essay on Knut Hamson, Updike actually takes the author to task for criticizing Emerson, and it is by means of the conventional misreading of Emerson that Hamson is able to criticize him: "Emerson's major failings are 'his undeveloped psychological sense and thereafter his overdeveloped moral sense.' Reverse the proportions, and you have Hamsun." Updike does not in this essay directly combat the myth of Emerson--after all, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend--but he hints at it.

It's not until "Big Dead White Male: Emerson Turns 200" in 2003 that Updike directly rejects the Emersonian myth. I am not sure how Goodman found the article condescending; Updike has clearly read nearly everything that Emerson produced, and his tribute to him reads a bit like a hagiography. He praises him for his antinomianism (usually a positive quality in Updike's brand of Christianity), and says that only Poe equalled him"as a homegrown critical and creative mind." (I have my own, anti-Updike opinions of Poe, but nevermind for now.)

I wonder if Goodman does not mistake Updike's attack on Lawrence Buell for an attack on Emerson. He is indeed harsh to Buell--a major scholar of the American Renaissance and, though I cannot find the evidence, a man who I am certain has written some major essay or another on Updike--whom he accuses of ivory-tower intellectualism and defensiveness. I think these are critiques that Emerson would get behind, at least in principle; after all, John Dewey argues that he is the "philosopher of democracy," always privileging the pragmatic over the abstract, and Emerson himself never bowed to or defended the past.

Besides that, I think that Updike is in actuality defending Emerson against Buell and other ivory-tower types:

A hundred years after Emerson's centennial was declared a school holiday in Concord and marked by an oration by William James and a public prayer that the spirit of Emerson inspire all present, he is put forward gingerly, apologetically, as a devalued stock on which we might still want to take a flyer . . . The endorsement seems excessively hedged, linking the sage's value to a presumed madness in society. Emerson was too much a realist, I think, to dismiss the workings of a society as mad, even a society like his own, passionately riven antebellum America. He pitched his palace of the Ideal on the particularities and rationale of what existed.

Updike's problem is with the political correctness that attempts to "prove" that Emerson was a racist or a classist and that discards his work because of it. These concerns are beside the point; and Emerson still has a lot to say, particularly in the essays which people don't usually read. Updike views Emerson as a consummate humanist, speaking directly to the human condition and offering concrete advice for it.

If this whole debate sounds familiar, it's because it's the same one that rages around Updike himself. Is he a racist? Is he a sexist? Maybe--that's not really my call to make. But his novels manage to speak to me, and they speak to many others as well, even if the Academy treats him as damaged goods. I've been at three different schools now, and I'm still the only academic I know who deals with him. And I don't get why that's the case.

Part 2 of this post will involve an Emersonian reading of Rabbit, Run, but give me a few days.

Still Feel Gone (Record #76)

This series is a continuation/"simulcast" of a series I do on Facebook about my mathematically determined Top 100 Records.

STILL FEEL GONE
Uncle Tupelo
Rock Pile, 1991

No Depression is the watershed Uncle Tupelo record, but that’s because of what it represents, not what it is. That record slams out of the gate with some fantastic songs—“Graveyard Shift,” “That Year,” “Before I Break”--but its second half is as weak as you’d expect from a record made by 19-year-olds. Do you ever listen to “John Hardy” or “So-Called Friend”? I don’t.

That’s not to say that Still Feel Gone is consistent, although its lows aren’t quite as low as No Depression’s. Jeff Tweedy’s songs remain sub-par for the most part, with the exception of the opening “Gun,” a Replacements-style barn-burner that’s the first perfect song Tweedy ever wrote. But “Watch Me Fall” shuffles its way nowhere, and “If That’s Alright” dies on the runway. “Nothing” fares a little better, although it’s attitude rather than skill that makes it worthwhile.

No, this is still Jay Farrar’s show, and Farrar’s big revelation is that he could write beer-weepers like “Still Be Around” just as well as he could write punk-screechers like “Postcard”--maybe even better. “Still Be Around” is a classic, a distillation of everything Farrar does right. He’s always had one of the best voices in both rock and country music, aged well before its time by cigarettes and whiskey, and hitting all the wrong notes in all the right places. This song beats the hell out of anything on No Depression, tossing out references to “Whiskey Bottle” just so we know he knows this is better.

The twin cousin to “Still Be Around” is “True to Life,” in which Farrar updates and reifies “Factory Belt” as a late-‘70s Springsteen anthem. It starts off slow. “I can only sing it loud. I always try to sing it clear,” he says, and then the other shoe falls with the beat: “What the hell are we all doing here?” It’s really a continuation of No Depression’s “Factory Belt,” with the angry guitars replaced by resignation and harmonica.

The band was still living in Belleville, Illinois, at this time, that remnant of the Rust Belt filled with dying car and beer factories, and Farrar’s dissatisfaction with the town bleeds through every note he sings. The one-two explosion of “Punch Drunk” and “Postcard” provide a slice of life in future ghost towns. “Everybody’s just spending his time just building and making / Someday, someone will say, ‘For what?’” he rages in the former--Farrar would never write another song this violent--before following it up in the latter with, “Nothing here to stand on.”

Even the song titles reflect the pain he feels for the broken-down blue-collars around him. There’s “Looking for a Way Out” (“You spent your whole life in this county / Never been out of state”), and there’s “Discarded” (“So goddamned hard to make it work / No easy way out of this one”). Farrar was working in his parents’ used bookstore at the time, and so he probably didn’t have first-hand experience in the beer factory, but he’s genuine and believable when he sings about this stuff.

Uncle Tupelo wouldn’t be in Belleville much longer--they’d move to St. Louis sometime between March 16-20, 1992 and Anodyne--and coincidentally or not, their music calmed down when they left. Something about the town itself seems to have turned them into the Minutemen, and while Still Feel Gone has its country elements, they’re less present than on No Depression, and certainly less so than on their next two records. Protest songs are easier when your guitars turn into razorblades, I suppose.

And so it is that Still Feel Gone is without a doubt the band’s most conventionally angry record--when it’s not out-and-out raging at George H.W. Bush and trickle-down economics, it’s in despair, the other side of anger. Uncle Tupelo (and for that matter, Son Volt and Wilco) would make better records, but never one this righteously indignant, this fed-up.

STILL FEEL GONE SONG-BY-SONG
Gun *****
Looking for a Way Out ****
Fall Down Easy ****
Nothing ****
Still Be Around *****
Watch Me Fall ***
Punch Drunk ****
Postcard ****
D. Boon ***
True to Life *****
Cold Shoulder ***
Discarded ****
If That’s Alright ***

Everybody Loves to Stick with a Loser

I was a big Red Sox fan when I was a kid, but I didn't follow baseball at all through my angsty teenage years. (A lot of that was due to my parents' watching the Braves play every single night when I wanted to watch whatever terrible sitcom I wanted to watch.) But once I got to college, I started supporting the Sox (and reluctantly, the Braves) again.

The Sox weren't that good in 2002, just like they haven't been that good for nearly a century. But now they've won two World Series, and following them is different. It's a little like watching your favorite indie-rock band hit the big time; you're afraid that people are going to think you listen to them only because they're popular.

The Sox aren't doing so hot so far this year--today's game was a bloodbath and an embarrassment--and somehow that makes me feel better about supporting them. What is it about losers and especially losing sports teams that attracts us? The Red Sox and the Cubs both have huge national followings--even when the Red Sox were terrible and even though the Cubs still haven't won in decades.

I've got no answers, and I'm counting on Joel to provide them.

Roger Kimball Wises Up

Maybe Kimball read my last post. Arts and Letters Daily included a link this weekend to this article where he argues against Rudyard Kipling's racism (along with a typical Aesthetic argument).

I've not read Kipling (I've seen Disney's Jungle Book, which has its own share of odd racial tensions), so I can't join in on the discussion. Anyone?

Eliot and the Five Types of Criticism

Here's the speech I gave my Comp II students at the top of this semester. I'm not sure if these ideas are totally viable or not--I worked them out on my own.

There are essentially five reasons that people call a particular work of art "great," the end result of which is that there are essentially five types of critics.

1) Aesthetic. "This is beautiful." In this category I class the 1890s Aesthetes (Wilde, Pater, et al), the New Critics (Wimsatt, Beardsley, Ransom), and what I term the Neo-Aesthetes (the Blooms, Frederick Crews, and Roger Kimball). In these latter, you tend to get a neo-Arnoldian streak of "preserving the best that Western civilization has to offer." I still call this Aesthetic.
2) Impressionist. "This moves me." I think this is the reason that most people start their love of literature. I am not aware of a major critic who primarily utilizes this method, however.
3) Moral. "This speaks the truth." I include in this category both the Christian critics and the Marxist critics, as well as the Black Arts folks from the 1970s. Moral critics tend to see art primarily as propaganda, as a political/social/religious vehicle for the Truth.
4) Social. Either "This changed things" or "This perfectly represents a given viewpoint."It is by means of social criticism that something like The Jungle--otherwise a poorly written book--ends up canonized or semi-canonized. Note that social criticism almost always has an element of moral criticism to it. There can be little argument that The Clansman perfectly represents a given viewpoint, but I do not think Paul Lauter is interested in putting it on one of his many canons.
5) Hermeneutic. "This is open for endless discussion." I used to call this the "deconstructive" school until Don Williams suggested that that particular term is too narrow and too polarizing. These critics value a work of art for its depth and the number of its possible interpretations.

If anyone would like to add a school of criticism to my schema, if anyone has found one that I've left off, please let me know.

Most people do not fit squarely into one of these categories, but I suspect close to all readers have one that lords over the other ones. I, for example, am primarily hermeneutic (and secondarily impressionist), and I have little to no interest in social criticism. My theory about these schools is that they're all more or less valid, but if you're in an argument over a particular work (like those tiresome canon arguments in the 1990s), there's no sense in arguing a different school than your opponent.

Let's say, for example, that Roger Kimball and Paul Lauter are arguing over whether we should take Othello out of the canon. (I have no idea if Lauter wants to or not.) Kimball will say, "This is a perfectly constructed play." Lauter will say, "This play is racist, and besides, we should take it out to open up the canon for other viewpoints." That argument is never going anywhere. Either Kimball needs to argue against the play's racism, or else Lauter needs to argue that the play is a piece of garbage on an aesthetic level.

I bring all this up because I am reading T.S. Eliot's selected prose right now, and he seems to subscribe to all of the schools. Eliot is pretty much forgotten as a critic, which I'm sure is a consequence of his being so closely associated with the New Critics. The New Critics loved Eliot because his poems were ideal for the New Criticism--they were tightly constructed and could (supposedly) be viewed on their own, without recourse to the author's intentions. I've taken three Literary Criticism and Theory classes, and I've never been taught Eliot's work, aside from a few offhand references to his "objective correlative."

That objective correlative is a particularly ugly aspect of the Aesthetic School; it's the idea that an author can toss together a given sequence of events or words and demand a particular emotional reaction from his readers. It sounds cynical to me, and a little too close to the sentimental fiction of the 19th century, in which the author would attempt via rhetorical tricks and bizarre plot points to make the reader cry on every page. It simultaneously utilizes and minimalizes the Impressionist School as a means to an Aesthetic end.

But something funny happened. When Eliot converted to Anglicanism in 1928, both his poetry and his criticism changed dramatically. I'll post about the differences between his pre- and post-Anglican poetry some other time, but his criticism opened up to all sorts of other directions, ones that the New Critics who praise Eliot seem to disregard.

For example, he begins to value the Impressionist over the Aesthetic. Emotions become the big deal for Eliot--he says in "The Music of Poetry" that "If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless." Emotion is not the sole judge of good poetry, but it's a major judge, and the post-1930 Eliot seems to think it is in many ways a better judge than pure Aesthetic criticism.

In an essay on Henry James, he even criticizes dry intellectual approaches to criticism:

Englishmen, with their uncritical admiration (in the present age for France, like to refer to France as the Home of Ideas . . . In England ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought.

It seems clear to me that it was Eliot's conversion that moved him from "corrupting his feelings" to "thinking with them"; Aesthetic intellectualism led him to the depths of despair in "The Waste-Land," despair that he was just beginning to escape in "The Hollow Men" and "Ash-Wednesday," but it's in his criticism that he really seems rescued, able to feel again.

Christianity also led to his establishment as a Moral critic supreme; at the top of "Religion and Literature," he claims that "Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint." He makes his own viewpoint clear, but his readers are not exactly instructed to follow it--the important thing in this essay is to have a standpoint. He no longer believes in objectivity, clearly. He also takes another delightful shot at the Aesthetes, one that reminds me of Walker Percy's The Second Coming, in which one of Will Barrett's aggravating friends reads Dante for the meter:

The people who enjoy these writings [The Bible, Jeremy Taylor, Clarendon, and Gibbon, among others] solely because of their literary merit are essentially parasites; and we know that parasites, when they are become too numerous, are pests.

Eliot is, of course, taking aim at his past self in quotes like these; his post-1930 criticism comes off like it's the ascending spiral staircase in "Ash-Wednesday," a method of purging oneself for divine purity. If he can decimate his former views enough, he's saved.

Elsewhere, he sounds like a Social critic. His criteria for a text being a "classic" involve, among Aesthetic considerations, its representing a particular culture. Indeed, it is the culture moreso than the text that is classical. Groups of authors pool their resources and influences to produce the cultural aura of the classical, and it's out of this that an individual author creates a classic text: "What we find, in a period of classic prose, is not a mere common convention of writing, like the common style of newspaper leader writes, but a community of text." Culture is extremely important for the post-'30 Eliot; his last two books attempt to provide a definition of culture and then figure out how to create one based on Christianity.

Finally, the seeds of postmodern criticism are latent in Eliot. In addition to his privileging of the reader's emotions and interpretations over the author's ("The meaning of a poem may be something larger than its author's conscious purpose, and something remote from its origins"), he levels the playing field between High and Low Art based on the number and importance of interpretations:

I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for "amusement," or "purely for pleasure" that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is the literature which we read with the least effort that can have the most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely.

Now, Eliot is of course horrified by popular fiction; even after his conversion, he's always a snob. But if not exactly a hermeneutic critic himself, he throws the doors wide open for it: All texts, he seems to say, need to be examined and parsed out, especially the ones we don't want to.

My conclusion from all this is that it's time for a re-evaluation of Eliot's nonfiction writing by critics of all stripes. I suspect that everyone is going to find something in his essays to love--and many other things to hate.

My Sister Never Made Love to Anybody Else but Me

Pierre is not a canonical Melville novel, at least not to the lay reader, who's maybe read "Bartleby the Scrivener" and at least knows Moby-Dick's reputation as a Great Book. But Pierre is forgotten for the most part, or if remembered, it's labeled at best a noble failure. (Even Hershel Parker, a name so synonmous with Melville studies that I even imagine he looks like him, put out an edition with entire chapters excised for cohesiveness.) This criticism is not unfounded. If Moby-Dick is a glorious mess of a novel, four or five smaller books tossed together without caution, Pierre is just a mess. The language is purposely obfuscating, the plot is simultaneously horrifying and boring, and the book's organization is nonexistent. Parker reveals that Melville was midway into the novel when the Moby-Dick reviews started pouring in and claims that the savaging that book received essentially drove him nuts, at which point he inserted a bunch of incongruous material about Pierre's foundering career as a writer. Regardless of the reason, though, the book flat does not work as a novel.

Philosophically, on the other hand, it's interesting. It's my contention that Melville fashioned Pierre as a direct attack on Ralph Waldo Emerson, certainly the most prominent American intellectual of the time. Emerson, in his early writings especially, was a consummate optimist; he clearly belives that mankind is essentially good and will eventually be close to perfect and that society is moving forward. Melville, to put it gingerly, does not share his sentiment.

I suspect much of this argument boils down to religious upbringing. Emreson was a Unitarian--ever the most liberal of the Protestant denominations--and so man can trust himself; he is not exactly fallen--more like confused--and Christ becomes the great Example rather than the Savior. Emerson's essays bleed with Unitarian thought, diluted though it is with Eastern Pantheism. Melville, on the other hand, was raised Presbyterian, that dour, dark, and fatalistic Calvinist sect that sees man as totally depraved and unable to help himself. This is not to say, mind you, that Melville was all that great of a Calvinist, particularly in terms of total depravity. He subscribes to the notion of the noble savage in Typee and Moby-Dick (always the least racist of the 19th-century authors, his most evil characters are always white), and Billy Budd is remarkably free from the taint of sin. But he believes in evil in a way that Emerson does not seem to--witness the sinister joy in the way the sailors disembowel whales or Claggart's horrifying obsession with Billy.

Emerson and Melville's argument may also have to do with a hermeneutic disagreement. Both men admired Plato, and I'm sure neither of them missed the discussions of depravity in Protagoras and Meno. Socrates does not believe that man has an evil streak; he does not knowingly or willingly do wrong:

Simonides was not so ignorant as to say that he praised all who did no evil voluntarily, as if there were any who did evil voluntarily. For myself I am fairly certain that no wise man believes anyone sins willingly or willingly perpetuates any evil or base action. They know very well that all evil or base action is involuntary. (Protagoras 345d, e)

Meno modifies his disbelief, however:

Isn't it clear then that this class, who don't recognize evils for what they are, don't desire evil but what they think is good, though in fact it is evil; those who through ignorance mistake bad things for good obviously desire the good. (77d, e)

Socrates says that man does not willingly desire evil. (I'd love to hear a conversation between him and Dostoevsky, whose Underground man desires both evil and unhappiness just because he can.) Instead, man desires the good but sometimes cannot differentiate between the two. I suspect both Emerson and Melville agree with this diagnosis; their difference lies in their opinions on man's capacity for differentiation.

In "Self-Reliance," Emerson famously expands Socrates' most famous maxim so it reads "Trust thyself":

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind . . . What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? My friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.

Emerson's pan(en)theism later contradicts this--if we all share an Oversoul, then doing as you please is ultimately following mankind as a whole--but no matter: "Follow your bliss" is a common enough theme in Emerson's work, and it is to this theme that I think Melville responds.

And so Pierre opens in medias res of the conflict between Emerson and Melville, with a glorious Emersonian paean to transcendent Nature:

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.

This sets up Pierre as an Emersonian hero, pure and innocent and ready to commune with God and Nature. But the plot of the book subverts Emerson. Pierre's idyllic country life is shattered when he discovers that his saintly father sired an illegitimate daughter. For some bizarre reason, he decides the best course of action is to leave his angelic fiancee mere days before their wedding, pretend to have married his sister, and move to Greenwich Village. Disaster, as you might expect, ensues.

It's important here that Pierre clearly believes he's doing the right thing; all the pain he will suffer "seemed to him part of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue," and he even codes his actions as a search for God. He follows Emerson's advice here; he does what his heart tells him to do without worrying whether his heart belongs to God or to the devil. But his actions bring ignominy both to him and his family--I won't give away any specific details, but suffice it to say that everyone's life is ruined. He's picked the dumbest of all possible options, and what's more, he knows this on an intellectual level:

But this last distrust [of himself] was not of the heart; for heaven itself, so he felt, had sanctified that with its blessing; but it was the distrust of his intellect, which in undisciplinedly espousing the manly enthusiast cause of his heart, seemed to cast a reproach upon that cause itself.

Pierre (and his inspiration, Emerson) privileges emotion over reason, the heart over the head; he shares Socrates' apparent optimism regarding human nature but ignores Matthew Arnold's famous warning to "Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." And Melville punishes him dearly for it.

But, philosophically interesting as it may be, Pierre is a mess of a novel. It reminds me of a severe version of my problem with Walker Percy's fiction: he's a great philosopher with no talent for telling a story. Except that Melville could once tell a story, and he would be able to again. I'm not sure what kills Pierre as a novel--whether it's the negative reviews of Moby-Dick or whether it's the heaviness of the subject and the vitriol with which Melville approaches it--but I'm filing it under imperfect nonclassics.

Looking for the Ghost of Tom Joad

The New York Review of Books has a fantastic essay on the latest Library of America edition of Steinbeck's works. I've not read an abundance of Steinbeck--just the three majors (Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden) plus Travels with Charley in Search of America, and that in itself suggests that he's not taught much in universities. (I read the three novels on my own, and Travels was assigned to me in a directed reading one summer.)

I think Steinbeck is essentially on the same continuum as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Upton Sinclair. Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle are not well-written books. They are clumsy and affected and melodramatic. And yet they've got a peculiar sort of uplift--they hit you, perhaps, in the gut instead of the head--and there's little doubt that they changed the world. Steinbeck's novels hit you harder, and they changed the world less, but I think history has ended up placing him with those novels rather than with his contemporaries like Faulkner and Hemingway.

I didn't teach any Steinbeck in my Comp II class this semester, and I doubt I will next year--his fiction is too simplistic, too jingoistic, too nailed down. I'll throw my support behind Travels with Charley in Search of America, though--it's less preachy than the novels, a cross-country travelogue more cohesive and enjoyable than On the Road and a highly personal love letter to America disguised as a piece of gonzo journalism. I was obsessed with the concept of spatiality the last year of my undergraduate work and the first year of my master's degree, and I think Travels set that off to some extent. "Nearly every American hungers to move," says Steinbeck early on, as he takes the camper out of park, and the book is pure joy from that point on.

So I don't know. If Travels with Charley manages to be something more than (a) jingoistic patriotism or (b) a pamphlet for the Communist Party, his fiction likely contains something beyond those things as well. It may be time for an academic re-evaluation of Steinbeck; he may be getting short-changed by the neo-aestheticism movement, and I suspect that a rereading of those novels would reveal something more subtle than my memory allows.